Last week, I wrote about cybersecurity issues raised by the loss of physical control in the U.S. Capitol during the occupation. Since then, it has become clear that a number of devices are missing and presumably taken by the occupiers. The rioters took laptops from the offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Jeff Merkley. These devices are now in the physical possession of people who can be considered adversarial threat actors, and those actors now have the opportunity to take their time in trying to penetrate them and see what data is available on those machines.

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A National Academies panel commissioned by the State Department shed new light on a disturbing and still mysterious episode. Employees in the Cuban embassy reported headaches, pressure, nausea, strange piercing noises, and cognitive problems seeming to emanate from a directed source. Commerce Department employees in China also had similar experiences. Dr. David Relman discusses some of what hampered the investigation.

Listen to the interview at Federal News Network

The recently revealed SolarWinds hack unfolded like a scene from a horror movie: Victims frantically barricaded the doors, only to discover that the enemy had been hiding inside the house the whole time. For months, intruders have been roaming wild inside the nation’s government networks, nearly all of the Fortune 500, and thousands of other companies and organizations. The breach—believed to be the work of an elite Russian spy agency—penetrated the Pentagon, nuclear labs, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and other offices that used network-monitoring software made by Texas-based SolarWinds. America’s intelligence agencies and cyberwarriors never detected a problem. Instead, the breach was caught by the cybersecurity firm FireEye, which itself was a victim.

Read the rest at The Atlantic

Foreign election interference must be bad if spy agencies are making public service announcements. Two weeks ago, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Christopher Wray held a press conference warning that Russia and Iran have been acquiring voter registration data and waging influence operations to sow division and tilt the election. And earlier in October, counterintelligence chief William Evanina and General Paul Nakasone—who heads both the Pentagon’s cyberwarriors and the supersnoopers of the National Security Agency—participated in a video alert designed to reassure Americans that the threats are real but they are on the job.

Read the rest at Foreign Affairs

John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, announced that the intelligence community would cut back on its briefings to Congress on electoral security. Amy B. Zegart, the author of three books on U.S. intelligence, including “Eyes on Spies: Congress and the United States Intelligence Community,” the standard book on the relationship between Congress and intelligence agencies, explains what the decision meant.

Read the rest at Washington Post

The findings show the Trump Campaign's interactions with Russian intelligence agencies posed what they're calling a "grave" threat to U.S. counterintelligence. For more, KCBS Radio news anchors Dan Mitchinson and Margie Shafer spoke with Kathryn Stoner, Deputy Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford specializing in Russian politics.

Listen to KCBS Radio

In 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) published the fourth installment in its effort to identify “megatrends” likely to shape world events a decade or more into the future. Shorenstein APARC Fellow and China expert Thomas Fingar, the then chairman of the NIC, oversaw that report, Global Trends 2025. The unclassified report uses scenarios to illustrate some of the ways in which the factors driving world events – from climate change to demographic decline to changing geopolitical powers – may interact to generate challenges and opportunities for future decisionmakers. One of these scenarios is the emergence of a global pandemic that bears a chilling resemblance to COVID-19.

We sat down with Fingar for an online conversation about the NIC report and its pandemic scenario, the government action it spurred, the United States’ failed initial response to the COVID-19 outbreak, and the implications of the current crisis for U.S.-China relations. Watch:

Twelve years after its publication, the NIC’s "Potential Emergence of a Global Pandemic" scenario (p. 75) has proven to be woefully accurate:

“The emergence of a novel, highly transmissible, and virulent human respiratory illness for which there are no adequate countermeasures could initiate a global pandemic. If a pandemic disease emerges by 2025, […] it probably will first occur in an area marked by high population density and close association between humans and animals, such as many areas of China and Southeast Asia […] Slow public health response would delay the realization that a highly transmissible pathogen had emerged […] Despite limits imposed on international travel, travelers with mild symptoms or who were asymptomatic could carry the disease to other continents. Waves of new cases would occur every few months. The absence of an effective vaccine and near-universal lack of immunity would render populations vulnerable to infection.”

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It was not a prediction, recalls Fingar, but rather an attempt to urge policymakers to think “beyond tomorrow,” past the end of their administration, and to stimulate strategic thinking about how to reinforce positive trends and change or ameliorate negative ones. If the report and its global pandemic scenario are precise, he notes, it is because the NIC’s effort involved the best specialists within the U.S. intelligence community and engaged numerous and varied groups of non-U.S. Government experts.

Yet the United States has been unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis is now worsening U.S.-China tensions. To address the crisis, however, argues Fingar, both countries must cooperate in the international fora. “Let that be the way that builds towards a better bilateral relationship.”

In a Lawfare post earlier this year, I questioned the wisdom of referring to cyber operations as psychological operations. These campaigns are the bread and butter of U.S. Cyber Command’s operational activities. My interest in this question stemmed from two recent articles, one on NPR and one in the Washington Post. The former discussed past activities of U.S. Cyber Command and the latter discussed possible future activities. Taken together, both articles used terms such as “information warfare,” “information operations,” “psychological operations” and “influence operations” to describe these activities.

I closed that post with a promise to comment on the doctrinal and conceptual confusions within Defense Department policy regarding all of these concepts. This post makes good on that promise.

Read the rest at Lawfare Blog